I Made a Handheld Virtual Boy (The Real Boy)

[Music] hello i'm shank and this is the real boy it's the world's first handheld virtual boy and it took me almost a year to build make no mistake this is not a virtual boy emulator inside this handheld is an actual virtual boy motherboard from a damaged virtual world along with lots of custom hardware electronics and code this project is one of the most difficult and ambitious projects i've ever taken on being the first of its kind i had countless unexpected issues and setbacks that pushed me the edge of just giving up on this project oh it was 30 volts no no no no no my screen's probably cooked so i just i've never seen anything like this look ac interference is what triggers it but that leaves a lot of questions how is this all possible and why of all consoles did i choose to build a portable out of nintendo's biggest commercial failure to date for those new to my channel my most common builds are turning wiis into portable gaming systems i built a few portable wiis throughout the years but before i enter the portableizing community we motherboard trimming and wii handhelds weren't really a thing when i first set out to document the wii circuit board and make my first portable wii i knew next to nothing about electronics everything was new uncomfortable and confusing but the challenges i faced making my first portable forced me to learn in order to overcome them and i was picking it up and learning faster than i could ever imagine but after completing a few wee portables i've gotten pretty comfortable with the process a little bit too comfortable i discovered that when it comes to learning when you start getting comfortable you stop getting better so after finishing the gamecube joycons i knew it was time for me to experiment with a project that would put me outside of my comfort zone and nothing says uncomfortable quite like the virtual boy not everyone knows about the virtual boy and honestly who can blame him before starting this project i had never owned or even used a virtual boy released in 1995 it was nintendo's first attempt at 3d virtual reality gaming the history of this console is fascinating after nintendo obtained exclusive licensing rights to rti's led eyepiece tech in the early 90s they set out to create an ambitious 3d virtual reality project led by the legend goonpe yokoi himself the project codenamed vr32 was going to change the way the world saw video games but then nintendo's corporate leaders got bored of the project they slashed vr32's r d budget and reassigned most of the dev team upper management wanted something to release during the gap between the super nintendo and their upcoming ultra 64 and pushed for an early release date to meet the new release window and budget restrictions the scope of the project was scaled back tremendously and the virtual boy was rushed out the door in 1995. it was a commercial flop only selling around 700 000 units it was promptly discontinued less than a year later the virtual boy is neat unique and ambitious but the technology just wasn't there in 1995 it feels like a rushed prototype rather than a complete market ready product but more importantly it has a small library of decent exclusive games that never saw the light of day on another system today it has hidden gems a cult following and a surprisingly active homebrew modding scene so how exactly does this red and black abomination even work let's crack it open and have a look here in the middle we have the motherboard this board has the processors and circuitry that run the virtual bully games as a result it is the most important part for this build as it is the only part i cannot replace with custom circuitry if i did it wouldn't be a virtual boy anymore on each side we have one of two eyepieces with a vertical row of tiny red leds light is bounced off these mirrors towards the user servo motors attached to the mirrors make them go 50 times a second turning the row of leds into what our eyes see as a square raster by turning on and off the leds at the precise moment synchronized with the mirrors these led rows effectively become tiny red and black screens down here we have the servo board which as the name implies controls the servo motors used on the mirrors the motherboard communicates with the servo board and the console will actually refuse to boot if the servo board or the motors are not present on the left we have a board with the audio amp for the built-in speakers and a board for the controller and link cable plugs but shank i hear you furiously typing isn't the virtual boy already portable it was marketed as a portable device with batteries to power it stored in the controller but calling it portable is a bit of a stretch it's pretty clunky and requires a table and chair to even use it it constantly nags you to take breaks and its literature has warnings all over it and while it probably won't give me eye cancer it isn't particularly comfortable to look at a play session feels about the same as falling asleep with my contacts in now that we understand how it works how can we improve it and make it portable the obvious solution would be to but honestly i'd like to go for something a little more traditional and pocketable nobody has ever built a virtual boy handheld before so i had a lot of figuring out to do but before we go into the changes i made first let's talk about the specific parts that make up game consoles nearly every video game console in existence is made up of the same six essential building blocks the first and most important portion of the console is the main circuit board also known as the motherboard or the mobo this is the heart and brain of the video game console and makes the console what it is it consists of all the processing chips needed for the console to operate and it connects to the five other building blocks first on the input side we have power this block consists of the power source such as outlets or batteries along with the circuitry needed to convert it into something the console can use next we have the game this includes not just the data of the game itself but the medium that is used to load it this can be a hard drive game cartridge flash drive disk drive or anything really depending on the game system the last input is the controller this is pretty straightforward and includes all the buttons sticks and electronics needed for you to play and interact with the game on the other side we have the output blocks the video block consists of the tv or screen along with the entire video signal chain the last block is audio which consists of the speakers and the amplifiers needed to drive them every video game system home or handheld is made up of these same six blocks as mentioned before the motherboard is the game system itself it cannot be replaced by custom parts or would not be the same game console however the other five blocks can and replacing these five segments is the key to transforming any video game console into a smaller more portable system so now that we understand these segments let's have a look at the blocks that make up the virtual boy and see what we can do to change and improve them first we have the motherboard there's no getting around this one if you want a virtual boy portable you need to use a virtual boy motherboard and the only place to get a virtual boy motherboard is from inside an actual virtual boy rather than harvest a perfectly working one i was given a board that was severely damaged from another modder's attempt to repair it one eyepiece data is totally fried so one eye will never work again fortunately i only need the data from one of the two eyes so this board is perfect to resurrect into a functional portal the next obstacle to tackle is the games the virgil boy uses cartridges to load and play games on most portables the goal is to replace the disk drive or cartridge slot with something more compact that can store an entire library of games unfortunately there just isn't a way to do that on the virtual boy at least not yet this means i'm stuck with using real original cartridges luckily the virtual voice cartridge slot isn't too big so i can work with that the stock cartridge slot sits really far away from the motherboard so it'll need to be modified and rewired this is done by cutting down the slot with a dremel and manually soldering wires to each of the 60 pins this took several hours but allowed me to reduce the thickness by a few millimeters the virtual boy has a lot of homebrew games including an excellent port of street fighter 2 called hyper fight to play these games i'm going to use this reprogrammable cartridge called the hyper flash 32. notice anything funny about this label it's not paper it's actually an e-paper display to program a different game on the cartridge from the micro sd slot just plug in usb power use the capacitive touch buttons on the back to select a game and the cartridge will reprogram itself into that game displaying community made artwork when it's done this slick reprogrammable cartridge was designed and made by mellott a well-respected contributor in the virgil boy modding scene huge shout outs to him for sending me one so i can feature more games later in the video video in the virtual boy is a little more complicated as we discussed earlier the virtual boy doesn't have a screen and also doesn't put out any standard video signal fortunately for me a brilliant modder by the name of fertek created an open source mod called the virtual tab this board allows the virtual boy to output a vga signal which i can send to any standard vga screen the picture quality is great and even supports changing color palettes with a push of a button while the virtual boy itself supports stereoscopic 3d the virtual tap doesn't implementing something custom with fpgas on say a 3ds screen is possible but far beyond my capabilities the virtual tab kit also includes a servo emulator board this tiny chip is programmed to trick the console into thinking the servo board is present and functional telling it exactly what it wants to hear for the controller i didn't want to harvest the components from an actual virtual boy controller and instead wanted to make my own the virtual voice controller is just a 16-bit shift register shift registers are simple common chips that can still be purchased today this means all i needed to do was buy a pair of 8-bit ship registers wire them up and call it a day but there's one big problem sometimes i'm a little too ambitious for my own good over the years my hardware and electronics capabilities have greatly improved as i have taken on more and more ambitious projects but there's something you should know i have a weakness something that has always held me back something no matter how hard i try i've never been able to overcome it's time i tell you what has always been my greatest limiting factor as a modder coding as long as i can remember i've always struggled with software and coding and this was an opportunity to force myself out of my comfort zone to learn something new so my plan at this point was to take the functions of a shift register add my own functions and put them onto a tiny reprogrammable chip known as a microcontroller i wired up a breadboard studied a several hundred page data sheet learned about spi protocol and just kidding turns out interrupts on the chip aren't fast enough for my goal to even be possible and it only took me a week of all night troubleshooting sessions to figure it out after my first hello world turned into a goodbye world it was time for a new plan instead of putting everything on one chip i was going to use normal shift registers and put my own custom chip between the buttons and the shift registers this would let me monitor the buttons that are pressed and perform different actions if certain button combinations are pressed simultaneously the downside to this approach is that i need 16 inputs and at least 16 outputs i tried wiring this all up by hand but it was messy and extremely unreliable instead i designed a custom circuit board to develop my codon rather than running every wire by hand circuit boards have tiny copper lines on them called traces these traces act like flat wires to connect everything on the board where they need to go without turning your project into spaghetti custom circuit boards allow for slimmer more organized and more reliable circuits in recent years making custom circuit boards for one-off projects like this has become more and more accessible there's free software to design the board free tutorials to teach you how and the circuit boards have become more affordable than ever for example with pcbway the sponsor for this video you can get 10 pcbs of your own design for just five dollars if you're interested in having your own professional circuit boards made i recommend giving them a shot they supplied the boards i used in this project and even supplied a batch of these fun decorative keychain pcbs to give away at the end of the video once my development board arrived i quickly assembled it and got to work unfortunately as i mentioned earlier i lacked the coding experience needed to actually complete this project sometimes though all you need is a good teacher allow me to introduce the first hero of this project crash bash he's a software engineer and close friend of mine who took me under his wing to help me complete the project him and i spent countless all-nighters over several weekends working through the software to get it right streaming the entire process to my discord server he walked me through the entire process as we worked on more and more complex aspects of the code at one point the software for compiling just straight up stopped working on my computer and crash had to remotely write code and have me test it finally after countless night owl sessions we got all the code for the controller working properly including all my bonus features by pressing certain button combinations i can change the color palette adjust screen controls and turn on and off leds the controller is sorted out so now we're playing with power the virtual boy is normally powered by six double a batteries gross for my project i'm going to use the same high capacity lithium cells found in modern electronics so i'll be using the n64 power management system this open source board was designed by gman for use in nintendo 64 portables but it's perfectly fit for this project it has the lithium protection battery management and dual voltage power supplies i need to power this project since the power management system is open source i was also able to tweak the code to tell the virtual boy to activate the in-game low battery indicator when the lithium batteries are low with a little help from crash bash of course finally comes the last block audio while the audio amp that comes with the virtual boy would do the job the board is pretty large and a lot of space can be saved by replacing it with a smaller amp a suitable replacement would need to accept analog audio work with speakers and support headphone jack audio with automatic switching when plugged in once again gman's open source pcbs come to the rescue with the uam which checks every box on the list the one caveat is that it uses digital volume controls in other words volume up and down buttons for my build i wanted to use an analog volume wheel for adjustment instead which required some tweaking to the code crash and i gave it a go but we encountered some of the strangest issues while doing so we later learned that another modder stoned edge had already made such modifications to the uamp code for another project so he sent me his functional code to end our suffering for any portable or project like this the case is the last thing you want to design it's important to design the case around your internals rather than vice versa for the cleanest most efficient end result i threw a sketch of the motherboard and a few screens into illustrator and drew mock-ups until i settled on this design it's only slightly bigger than the motherboard and is built around a 4.3 inch ips wide screen display after i figured out the shape i added some visual flair to make it more reminiscent of the virtual boy the front is stylized like the visor of the virtual boy with the same red and black seams i added a gray border to match the eye shroud and colored the buttons to match the dark red translucent lenses for the eyepieces for the back i took inspiration from the other side of the virtual boy matching the geometry and logo stylization i feel the behavior of a controller's buttons isn't something you think about much until you hold a third-party controller and realize something has gone horribly wrong for the shoulder buttons i designed a modular system using three screw posts and an extremely satisfying semi-tactile switch i spent a solid week tuning the design until it felt just right somewhere between the super nintendo and the nintendo 64 shoulder button for the face buttons i wanted to capture the oh so satisfying feel of the game boy advance i modeled the same button wells and used the same membranes to preserve the authentic feel but official game boy advance buttons don't come in the color i wanted and third party buttons just don't feel the same fortunately an old friend of mine baseline runs a business making custom controllers and controller parts he was kind enough to res and cast some forbidden jolly ranchers i mean buttons in the color of my choice and all i had to do was ask nicely yes where are my buttons i'm literally making him right now actually i am i'm making him right now baseline is the coolest ape with a knife out there and he makes fantastic controllers if you're looking to get one made i highly recommend checking him out next i got to work 3d modeling the case in autodesk inventor i found a 2ds like wedge profile was not only comfortable but the most efficient use of internal space for all the ports i wanted to have for any well-designed portable it's essential that the shell and its internals are built around each other custom printed circuit boards were the secret sauce to making a portable this clean and compact this project uses a total of 11 circuit boards nine of which were custom six of which i designed myself this case and the boards were designed together to fit hand in hand with matching screw posts and snap fits the motherboard screws into the cart slot cover with room on the sides for batteries the thickest part of the portable these two plates are screwed down on top of the motherboard holding it in place while providing mounting points for most of the other circuit boards most parts are either screw mounted or snap fit including the screen which is held in from behind by carefully planned tolerances the two halves of the case have snap fits along the edges allowing it to snap closed without the use of screws while designing the case i also was designing these six custom pcbs specifically to fit in my case once i finished them i uploaded them to pcb way customized them all to be read and got them in the mail about a week later this first pcb houses all the components needed for the controller i programmed on my dev board along with the pinocchio silk screen because he's a real boy on the other side i have contact pads for the d-pad and four face buttons which i had gold plated for improved responsiveness and reliability it connects using a flex cable to another board that houses the other six face button contacts the next pcb was used to mount the headphone jack usb-c charging jack and hdmi video out port i also put my patrons names on the back because y'all are super awesome and i appreciate every one of you hdmi video output is achieved through a board i harvested from a vga to hdmi converter cable rather than soldering 19 hdmi wires by hand i designed an adapter pcb to easily run it straight to my io pcb the last two boards serve no electrical purpose and only exist as mounting points for the volume wheel controller port and link cable while it seems a little overkill custom pcbs are really inexpensive and these mounting boards were simple enough to design in a single night as i've mentioned in my other videos painting is not my specialty and i wanted to avoid doing so for this project instead my friend mitch volunteered to print my project using multi-material 3d printing multi-material 3d printing lets you 3d print a single piece with multiple colors by splicing welding and feeding in different colors into the same extruder the biggest downside to this is the 3d printer needs to print a large purge block to clear the extruder whenever it changes colors this can be very wasteful the other downside is the added complexity means getting a perfect print takes a lot more tuning we went through five spools and lots of failed attempts before we had a final case i was satisfied with mitch was super patient with how picky i was and he did a fantastic job helping me bring my vision to life he has a youtube channel and twitter account where he showcases content and projects of his own so if projects like these interests you i highly recommend checking him out when a case comes off the printer it still needs a lot of post-processing to pretty it up first up was sanding i tried wet sanding by hand a process i've utilized in previous projects but found i got much better results wet sanding with a palm sander i started with 220 grit and slowly worked my way up to 12 000. for our first attempt at the logo on the back mitch and i attempted to include it in the multi-material printing process but the letters left tiny gaps that were too small to be filled by the printer and trying to melt plastic into the holes only made things worse instead mitch cut some vinyl decals to use as painting stencils next i picked up some primer clear coat tape and other essential supplies i needed to finish up this case unfortunately despite my best efforts it was painting time i peeled and applied the stencil and wrapped it in tape to protect the rest of the case i applied a few coats of primer then peeled away the tape and stencil leaving nice clean letters then i just applied a few coats of clear coat to the case to protect the letters and waited a few days for it to dry finally it was time to assemble everything this was the culmination of everything i had worked on over the past few months so much effort into careful planning and design meant the process was straightforward and planned out once the majority of the space consuming parts were installed it was time to finally close the case and it didn't close throughout the entire design process i tested these snap fits on cases i printed on my 3d printer but mitch's 3d printer the printer that had printed the final case had different parameters that i had not accounted for when printed on his printer the snap fits closed but they didn't have as much clamp force as mine meaning it couldn't hold the case together when it was full the design had to be tweaked and the case had to be remade and the internals would need to be transplanted this was crushing to my morale but i was going to finish this project if it killed me i wasted no time tweaking the case to fix it mitch the hero he is got right to work on printing the new cases for me with my modified design once i had a solid printed case i sanded it to 12000 grit applied a stencil applied primer clear coat and let it dry again now with case number two in hand it was time to remove the internals from the old case and reassemble them in the new one hopefully for the last time and now for the moment of truth success finally after almost a year of work the real boy real virtual boy hardware real virtual boy games all in a handheld pocketable form factor it has all the features you could ask for in a modern portable usb c charging headphone jack ips screen hdmi video output external controller support it has it all i even included the virtual boy link cable port just in case i ever meet someone else with a virtual boy the multi-material 3d printed case and glowing resin cast buttons pay homage to the original virtual boy design button combinations allow me to adjust screen controls change the color palette and even enable an rgb mode this project pushed me to the limits on all fronts but i couldn't be more proud of the results as part of the sponsorship for this video i was able to convince pcbway to fund a small giveaway to showcase how versatile their custom pcbs are this double-sided gamecube joy-con keychain is a printed circuit board i designed myself i had pcbway make a metric crap ton of these for me so i can give them away for free until i run out here's how you can get one i recently set up a po box all you have to do is send a letter and include a stamped self-addressed return envelope simple as that when i get the letter i'll open it drop the keychain in the return envelope and send it back check the description for more detailed instructions i plan to continue to give these out until i run out you don't have to include anything else in the envelope but letters art and other goodies are certainly welcome behind every video i upload is months of work which is why i only upload a few times a year i read as many of the comments as i can and all the kind words support and art have kept me motivated to push through to the end thank you to everyone who has liked subscribed and share my videos it really does make a difference i have many more projects in the pipeline i'm really excited about but in the meantime you can check out my discord server twitter and instagram to see what i'm up to that's all for this video thank you for watching and i'll see you next project [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Shank Mods

Views: 2,150,943

Keywords:

Id: e9FhIZkm4cw

Length: 27min 21sec (1641 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/UnSafeThrowAway69420]

This video is absolutely fucking crazy. It starts off pretty slow (circuit boards and the history), but holy shit the last half of the video is insane! Man that thing is a literal piece of art..

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/cappnplanet]

I enjoy emulating virtual boy on my rg351p

[u/tells]

I remember actually playing with a friends virtual boy one time. I wasn’t very old but I knew we had a long way to go for actual VR.

[u/TheGillos]

The part about having the 3D printed case not work really hit too close to home. Those are the moments that test men's souls.

[u/kinopiokun]

Still have my Virtual Boy!

[u/dantoucan]

I had a friend who had a virtual boy, he hated it so let me use it whenever i wanted. I'd spend hours in that thing, it was actually a lot of fun, played the shit out of bomber man and red alarm. I think i threw up one time, maybe twice.